So, people often think of Haworth, where we are, as a very remote place but in fact, it's
got a very double-sided identity to it. On the one hand behind it are the moors, wild,
barren, all the things that we know from Wuthering Heights, but looking down onto the town, it's
a working town - it's full of weavers and they're going through deep hardship at the
time, because of the process of industrialisation throwing them out of work and then the mills
gradually come here to Haworth. But they're not in any way cut off from this, you know,
this is a town where you could see people - men urinating in the streets and their father
was the vicar. He was very involved in concerns with the water supply, with social depravation,
so it's often wrong I think, to think of them as people cut off from the modern world. In
many ways, here in Haworth, they're right at the centre of it.
So, Haworth was a mix of rural and industrial and like many industrial places, it was very
unhealthy. It was estimated in a report published in 1850, that the average life expectancy
in Haworth was 25 years and of all the children born here, 40% would die before reaching the
age of six. Patrick Brontë had recognised that Haworth was an incredibly unhealthy place
and he was instrumental in petitioning the General Board of Health and they sent an inspector
here who produced the report, so we've got quite a detailed picture of Haworth at that
period and it was stressed in the report that Haworth - the health situation here, was comparable
to some of the worst of the London slum districts. I think the main problem was the contaminated
water supply. All the public wells and pumps were situated below the level of the churchyard.
They were fed by moorland springs which were actually running through the graveyard and
the graveyard itself is quite a major factor in the unhealthy state of Haworth. It's been
estimated that there were 40,000 people buried in the churchyard. It was severely overcrowded
and the Inspector, the Health Inspector, was quite concerned that it was contributing to
the unhealthy state of Haworth and also the custom of covering graves with large flat
stones prevented the growth of vegetation, which would aid the dispersal of the gases
of all during decomposition, which is why the trees that we see today were planted in
the churchyard, but it was quite a grim and quite an unhealthy place to live in. I think
once you have that information, you know it kind of changes your view about the Brontës and their lives here.